Over the past month we have made some major progress on the BSD port of Bordeaux. Bordeaux for FreeBSD now has a .sh installer, the same one that we use on Linux, so you will need to have py-gtk installed for the installer to work properly.

We also have a newly built .pbi for PC-BSD 7, a big thanks goes out to the folks at PC-BSD for doing the packaging for us. If you use PC-BSD you will need to install Wine 1.1.4 from their PBI directory in order for Bordeaux to work, prior versions of Wine in the directory don’t have support for wineprefixcreate.

Some of the major changes in this build are activex, flash and java are automatically installed for you when IE 6 is installed. Now IE 6 should open most pages that require activex support. We have the back end of the new cellar-manager mostly done now, to see what changes are planed just run cellar-manager –help and you will see a list of all the planed features. This version also incorporates the newest winetricks script and the updates that have been made to it over the past couple months. and of course lots of tweaks and bug fixes.

If you’re a FreeBSD or PC-BSD user and need to run any of the software that we currently support on the Linux client you might be interested in helping beta test this build and future builds up to the final stable release. At this time we cant give away beta builds, but what we can do is if you decide to purchase a license from the store for FreeBSD (beta) or PC-BSD (beta) your support will last six months after the final build is released, so don’t worry you will get a full six months of upgrades and support on the final product. And by purchasing a pre release build you can submit your input and help support the development process. Users who buy the BSD (Beta) will have the option of downloading the tgz (sh file) or the .pbi file.

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 7 (Fibonacci Edition).

This release marks a milestone for PC-BSD, by moving to the latest FreeBSD 7-Stable and also incorporating the KDE 4.1.1 desktop. Users will immediately notice the improved visual interface that KDE 4.1.1 offers, as well as a large improvement in hardware support and speed from the update to FreeBSD 7-Stable. PC-BSD 7 also offers a large and growing library of self-contained PBI files available for installation, and improvments for other locales on our PBI Directory website. This release also offers new methods of installation, including a DVD, USB and Internet / Network install.

After 14 months, 24 public betas, 40 developer snapshots and more than 45,000 downloads we’re very proud to announce the availability of version 1.0

A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed patches, reported bugs, troubleshot hardware, provided translations and those actively helping in the forums. So many people have helped out with this effort it is impossible to begin naming names. We are a small group and could not have gotten this much accomplished without the community at hand.

We’d also like to thank our main sponsors Auerswald and Deciso for providing us with the financial means to continue full-time development as well as OpenVox who has donated a wide variety of testing hardware. You all are keeping this Open Source project afloat.

PC-BSD Beta1 is already available for download and according to a recent interview with Kris Moore ” … as long as no serious bugs are found, we plan on going gold early to mid-September.”

The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD version 7-BETA1!

This release marks the first PC-BSD based on FreeBSD 7-STABLE and the KDE 4.1 desktop, and also provides many new ways to install, including DVD, USB and Network/Internet installation choices. Our PBI site has also been updated with a wide variety of software ready for PC-BSD 7, with more being added weekly.

Based on the FreeBSD operating system (a Unix derivative), FreeNAS is a server operating system that offers lots of features, a very small footprint, and a can’t-beat-it price (it’s free). Developed by an open-source community, it is constantly evolving (with even nightly builds).

FreeNAS is more complicated to install and use than Microsoft’s more feature-rich product, but people willing to navigate the sometimes confusing installation routine are rewarded with a robust network-attached storage device.

Robert Watson, who heads the TrustedBSD project, has updated the project’s website. The most striking change is that the different components / subprojects that are being worked are shown as tabs at the top.

For those unfamiliar with TrustedBSD, TrustedBSD is not a FreeBSD fork or anything like that, but it’s a set of trusted operating system extensions to FreeBSD. It was begun primarily by Robert Watson with the goal of implementing concepts from the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation and the Orange Book.

The TrustedBSD project is an open source project developing advanced security features for the open source FreeBSD operating system, including file system extended attributes and UFS2, Access Control Lists, OpenPAM, security event auditing with OpenBSM, mandatory access control and the TrustedBSD MAC Framework, and the GEOM storage framework. Many technologies from TrustedBSD may also be found in operating systems beyond FreeBSD, including Mac OS X, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux.

This project is ongoing and many of its extensions have been integrated into FreeBSD.

So heres my dilemna for a project I’m working on.
I need a rather broad solution covering DNS, proxying, firewalling, VPN (both site to site and LDAP integrated user access), DHCP, supporting multiple DMZ servers along with routing support. This will act as the centre point for a 40 person network. Clearly hardware wise this will have to be quite a strong system, with load balancing being a possibility, at minimum hardware failover